Rare Languages Group (Ukrainian etc.)

Dear all, Dear colleagues,

Firstly I’d like to say a heartfelt thanks for being prepared to translate and work in this context. I’d also like to apologise straight away that I won’t be able to communicate with you all individually and am using these letters instead. A brutal war has broken out in Ukraine, and any replies to your questions will tend to arrive ‘as and when’ they can.

Thank you for your understanding. Links to the work can be found here:

1. Announcement in DE, EN and UA, link to this channel/community Rare Languages Group (Ukrainian etc.) | Knowledge Centre on Interpretation (europa.eu)

1. Official information from a verified source (the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry) is available here War in Ukraine. Most current reports are in English.

1. We work on concrete, one-off texts that are relatively dense. Most communication is in Ukrainian, and some in other languages (not normally in German). There are Telegram channels for each language, see below (pls request via email on an individual basis). If you have Telegram, please click on these. If you don’t have Telegram, you can still get ‘read only’ access/authorisation.

2. In the channel for your language, you can write in that language. Thank you, and until my next letter.

   Greetings from your colleague, Nataliya Yena

   P.S.: If you have specific questions on the work, and these are important and urgent, please email me individually. I will then send you my mobile number so we can communicate more quickly.

Liebe Kollegen,

hier sind die Übersetzungen der Rundbriefe ins Englisch und Ukrainische. Wir arbeiten auf diesem Kanal pro bono, Übersetzungen in alle Sprachen aus dem Ukrainischen werden veröffentlicht. Danke und bis zum nächsten Brief.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Nataliya Yena

Dear colleagues,

Sincere thanks to each and every one of you who is prepared to translate for Ukraine pro bono. As I have said before, listed below are the channels you can respond to. Please do take into account that there will be breaks in communications, because the translation centre is in Lviv at the University, and Ukraine is at war. Students and lecturers work there. They need to flee to air raid shelters from time to time during the day, for instance if there is an air raid warning, and at night. They are often working from underground stations. Please bear that in mind and communicate accordingly at all times.

This is the Translation Centre: Центр перекладу (please request individually). Everything is coordinated from there.

This is the overview of everything that’s being translated, and into which languages: переклади - Google Sheets. The source texts are always in Ukrainian. These are translated into English, German and French very quickly. The translations are by lecturers and students, as far as I know they are not native speakers of those languages. These texts need to be edited/reviewed by professional translators who are native speakers.

The finished translations are published on the University’s Twitter account and Telegram channel:

Telegram https://t.me/ukrainianwarnewstranslated

Twitter https://twitter.com/Ukrainiannews3?t=VSdisCI8r8VEcBzZXpGAjA&s=09

Greetings from your colleague, Nataliya Yena

Dear colleagues,

Due to the attack by Russian forces, Ukraine is currently in urgent need of our professional skills as linguists. Help is needed with translations from Ukrainian into every other language. Since there is a war raging in Ukraine, we can offer no pay and hope for voluntary contributions.

A pop-up coordination centre for translators has been established at the University of L’viv. Translation work will be done using Google Docs. All necessary contacts are available.

If you are willing to help, please sign up after this message.

Thank you so much!

Collegial greetings,

Nataliya Yena, Ukrainian, German, English, Russian

P.S.: Please note! Sign up if you want to help, even if you don’t work from or into Ukrainian. Translations can also be done from texts already translated by a native speaker into, for example, English, German, and French.

Thank you again, every bit of help is needed. And any support is highly appreciated.

Translated into Engish by KB

Sehr geehrte Kollegen,

wegen des ausgebrochenen Kriegs, benötigt die Ukraine heute dringend unsere aller Fachhilfe. Es werden Übersetzer aus dem Ukrainischen in alle Sprachen gesucht. Wir arbeiten auf Freiwilliger-Basis, angesichts der aktuellen Kriegslage im Land.

Es gibt ein Ad-Hoc-Koordinierungszentrum für Übersetzer an der Universität zu L’viv. Wie arbeiten über Google Docs. Alle erforderlichen Kontakte sind vorhanden.

Bitte melde dich hier unter diesem Beitrag, wenn du uns helfen willst.

Danke vom Herzen!

Kollegialer Gruß,

Nataliya Yena, Ukrainisch, Deutsch, Englisch, Russisch

PS: Wichtig zu wissen! Melde dich, wenn du helfen willst. Selbst wenn du kein Ukrainisch übersetzt. Übersetzungen können auch aus den bereits von Muttersprachlern übersetzten Texten, und zwar aus dem Englischen, Deutschen und Französischen, sowie anderen Sprachen gemacht werden.

Danke, jeder Beitrag ist wichtig. Für jeden Beitrag ist man dankbar.

Dear Nataliya, Thank you for creating this group. I am a Brussels-based staff intepreter with EN A, FR A, NOR C, RU C. I have been working independently on Ukrainian for three years or so. I have been struggling to find a language tutor in Brussels. Preferably someone who is used to working with interpreters. Do you know anyone? Many thanks.

Dear Colleagues,

welcome to the rare languages group and most heart-felt greetings from Germany! I am very happy there are a few of you who have joined this community. Why don’t we introduce ourselves? I start with myself. I am a Frankfurt-based freelance conference interpreter with Ukrainian and English as my key languages, but I also offer German and Russian. This year in May I’ll have three full decades of linguistic services. That’s more than two-thirds of my whole life. Before the corona pandemic my focus was on conference interpreting. I loved both, simultaneous and consecutive, chuchotage was also part of my portfolio. I loved travelling to assignments for the European Institutions in Brussels and Luxemburg but also in the rest of Europe for private market assignments. My key destinations, though, where Brussels and Berlin.

Corona has changed it all. I went into translations again, something I haven’t done in a long time. I didn’t count pages but it feels like I’ve translated as much text as if I would have transcribed 10 conferences each of 10 days with 8 hours straight without any breaks.

Obviously, with working languages like Ukrainian that are far from mainstream and are usually booked as auxiliary languages in Brussels and Berlin, or for some rare specific events with a single focus of Ukraine, I had to change and adapt to the new circumstances the pandemic has wrought us.

Luckily, I had a pre-pandemic office consisting of more than one room. So that I had space and I could buy equipment and create a work station for remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI). And nothing happened. Who on earth, I thought, is going to book Ukrainian-English during a lockdown in Europe and beyond? It’s a niche language pair and with all that investment into the RSI equipment my hopes started to dwindle away. Unlike for Russian-English with a livelier market but, to be fair, with also a much more significant competition I saw zero changes for anything coming up with Ukrainian.

However, hope dies last, and despite all my doubts, in the second half of the year I nailed my first RSI-assignment. What was that a joy! Obviously, my booth partner and I suffered though mediocre sound, some of the speeches that were read from paper we had gotten never to see and yet some other speakers were speaking like machineguns so that we struggled to understand them in our native language, let alone to interpret. On top of all that we interpreted the hard-to-believe 25 presentations in six hours with a single 15-minutes break. Despite all these challenges it was our premiere, the client was happy, my booth partner and I did just fine and I was unfathomably happy to having had my first RSI gig with the new equipment that worked.

What the future will bring, the time will show. I humbly hope to use my RSI-room more often. I harbour this unquenchable belief that we will resume travelling and personal communication some time soon. Sure, there are advantages of virtual communication, it saves time and money for travelling but us being human, I believe that after a year of corona would be lovely to have at least an outlook for an in-person event.

Please kindly share your experiences before and during corona. How do you envisage our profession, specifically the fate of the niche languages in the after-the-corona times? Happy to read from all of you soon!